The Clover House (11 page)

“Water seeks its own level,” says Nikos.

“Nestor wasn’t supposed to open the door,” my mother says.

“Can we speak kindly,” Thalia pleads, “of the man who just died?”

“What were we going to do, Clio?” says Sophia. “Leave the boy in there forever?”

Sophia takes the story over, speaking directly to me, as if I am the only one who needs to have her version of family history set straight.

“One of the storerooms was full of food. Bags of rice and flour. This was during the war,” she says. “Imagine.”

“It was not during the war,” says my mother. “I was only sixteen. I know because I remember the book I brought home from school that day.”

“If it wasn’t during the war, it was right before the war. Anyhow,” Sophia goes on, “you can imagine what happened to that food when water got to it.”

“It was one giant rice pudding,” Thalia says to Demetra, pinching her cheek.

“All of it ruined,” says Sophia. “When we needed supplies like that.”

My mother exhales loudly. “None of it was ruined, because the water went down the drain,” she says.

I shake my head. “There wasn’t one.”

“Then someone,” she says, her voice rising, “must have changed it. Things change, Calliope, you know. Because there was a drain in the scullery in the old house when we were children before the war.”

“What’s so important about a dumb drain?”

We all look at Demetra, who is pouting into her plate. Thalia caresses her head.

“It is dumb, Demetraki,” I say, laughing. “You’re absolutely right. Tell us about the parade.”

Demetra brightens and describes the floats and performers she can’t wait to see tonight. We listen, happy to share in the little girl’s excitement as we pick at the nuts and oranges that Aliki has set out on the table. Finally, Nikos rises and leads the aunts to the living room.

In the kitchen, I scrape sauce and bits of lamb into the garbage while Aliki stacks the plates. In the hubbub of the aunts, she has forgotten that I’m supposed to be treated specially. It feels good.

“Do you, at least, remember the story?” I ask.

“I don’t think anybody does, Paki. It’s all so long ago, and they’re old women now. They’re starting to forget things.”

“True, but that’s not what just happened here.”

“Look,” she says, setting the plate down. “
Áse to
. Leave it alone. We grew up with some nice stories. Sometimes they told them one way, sometimes another. Leave it at that. Nikos reads and reads about the war and the civil war, and he’s never any clearer on the details. Even the historians can’t agree on what really happened.”

As I dry the plates Aliki hands me, I tell myself that she’s right and I should take her approach. It shouldn’t matter. These are only stories, after all. But I can’t deny that it does matter to me. My mother’s stories were the one way I had of connecting to her—of finding some shared refuge from the cloud of her unhappiness. During the winters when I was far from Thalia’s embraces and Sophia’s loving vigilance, those stories gave me a glimpse of mischief and delight. I can’t let them go that easily.

Clio

May 1940

Clio turned and watched as a low-slung Citroën drove down the dusty street. Her father still insisted on a carriage, declaring that cars were for the profligate. Whoever owned the Citroën might be profligate, but he had passed by with a white-sleeved elbow resting stylishly on the open window, gauntleted fingers drumming the top of the door frame.

The car tires had kicked up more dust than carriage wheels did. Clio could feel it sticking to her neck where she had begun to sweat a little. The leaves of the sycamores were too young to shade the sidewalks properly, and though there were weeks left to the school year, there was a summer heat in the air. She slowed her pace and let her sisters and brother pass her. After a few steps, they turned and waited.

“Speed up, Clio,” Sophia said. “Come on.”

“Go on without me. I don’t care.”

“Fine.”

Sophia turned forward again and murmured something to Thalia, who took a peek over her shoulder. Nestor pressed up
behind them. They walked on like that, a few paces ahead of Clio but never outpacing her. Clio knew they desperately wanted to go faster, to get home to lunch and shade, but they were incapable of breaking free. She was their eldest sister, after all, and they always followed her—even when they walked ahead.

By the time they reached the house, Thalia could bear it no longer and bounded up the front steps. She yanked one of the doors so wide open that it banged against the house, and Clio heard a cry from inside—Irini, the cook, yelling at her again. Clio arrived on the top step and stood in the doorway for a moment, exhaling and easing her shoulders back. She pulled the door shut behind her. Thalia, Sophia, and Nestor were long gone, their leather book bags in a heap in the foyer.

Clio looked up at the atrium window, noting the direction of the shaft of light that marked the black-and-white foyer floor like a sundial. It was pointing to her left, toward the study door: early afternoon. She could hear faint sounds of clanging pot lids coming from the kitchen at the back of the house. Straight ahead of her, on the other side of the atrium, the open doors to the dining room revealed the long table already set with china and silver for lunch. A newspaper rattled in the study, and her mother said something softly, to which her father murmured a reply. Nestor burst out of the back hall, crossed the atrium, and ran up the wide stairs to the landing and the inner balcony that ringed the airy space. He went into his room, where she could hear him opening and closing his dresser drawers.

Clio turned to face the large mirror that leaned against the foyer wall in a frame of dark carved wood. She set her book bag down and nudged it away with her foot as she adopted a pose: left hip cocked, weight on the left foot, right foot slid outward
with the toe pointed to the side. She moved a hand to her hip and gave her reflection a hard stare, chin out like Garbo, with the same slight waves in her shoulder-length hair. She brought her face close to the glass and raised one eyebrow, letting her lips form a tiny, mocking smile. With her face this close to the mirror’s surface, she could forget about her school uniform with its cobalt-blue pinafore over a crisp white shirt. She could picture herself in that Citroën, wearing stockings and heels instead of the white ankle socks that peeked out of her brown T-strap sandals. With her face this close, all she could see was the olive skin of a young girl whose high cheekbones and straight nose were about to make her beautiful.

She drew back from the mirror and saw Sophia and Thalia standing behind her, pulling faces. She wheeled around.

“Hey!” she cried, and the other two fell into smothered laughter. They staggered off, giggling and thrusting their hips from side to side. It was fine for them to tease, but at fourteen and twelve they were children still, Sophia’s braids tight and long and Thalia’s curls only faintly controlled with a ribbon headband. They had no idea yet what it would mean to be grown up.

Clio gave her book bag a kick and wandered over to the square of light coming down from the atrium.

She turned her closed eyes up into the sun, thinking of what to do until her parents or Irini called her for lunch. She didn’t want lunch. The food would be heavy and rich, and there would be too much of it. Two main courses to choose from, then cooked vegetables like
fassolakia
or a
gratinée
, and then fruit and possibly even dessert. She wanted something else.

“No!” Irini shouted as soon as Clio pushed through the kitchen door. “No, go right back out, young lady. The food will be out when it’s ready.”

Clio opened a cupboard and drew out a jar full of
vanilia
, a sticky vanilla mastic.

“I’ll be gone in a minute,” she said, reaching for a glass and filling it with water from a pitcher she took from the refrigerator.

“You’re ruining your appetite,” Irini said.

“Irini, nothing could make me skip a meal that you had cooked.”

She dug a spoonful of mastic out of the jar and dunked the spoon into her water glass. This is what she wanted now, something sweet: an
ypovrichio
. A submarine. She gave Irini a smile over her shoulder as she pushed back out of the kitchen.

“Now they’ll all be coming in here for an
ypovrichio
,” Irini was muttering.

Clio took the stairs down to the basement, looking for someplace quiet and cool where her sisters and brother would not come and pester her to get them a treat as well. She sat down on the bottom step at one end of a long hall lined with storerooms and sucked at the
vanilia
, gazing at her image on the back of the spoon.

The sounds of cart wheels and footsteps and the occasional car motor came faintly through the basement windows. People were heading home for lunch all over Patras. In Clio’s neighborhood, cooks were spooning lamb or chicken and pilaf or her father’s favorite,
moussaká
, onto porcelain platters. They were sprinkling salads with oregano and olive oil and salt. By the harbor, dockworkers were eating fried anchovies from a paper cone or tugging chunks of pork
souvlaki
from bamboo skewers with their teeth. At school, some of the boys would come back to the classroom with little dabs of oil glazing their fingernails where they hadn’t thought to clean. She didn’t think she could like a boy with oily nails.

As Clio was readjusting her position on the step, she spilled some water onto the tiles of the basement floor. She thought nothing of it until she rose, spoon in hand, to peer up at the sidewalk through one of the windows. She slipped on the water, and, losing her balance, spilled more onto the floor. A child now, she pushed off with one foot and let her other ride the film of moisture in a short glide. She was doing this a second time when Thalia appeared on the stairs.

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Where’d you get the
vanilia
?”

“You can’t have one. You’ll ruin your appetite.”

“What’re you doing?” It was Nestor now.

Clio should have known that they would not be able to stay away. Wherever she went, they came to find her. Even when they mocked her, that was only because they found her too interesting—or too mysterious—to leave alone.

She had an idea.

“I’ll show you, Nestor. Come here.”

The boy came to her side and she tousled his hair. He had dark black curls that apparently came from their father, whom she couldn’t imagine as anything but bald. Sophia had joined Thalia now and they both crept farther down the stairs.

“What is it?” Thalia asked.

Clio drained the water glass and set it down by the foot of the steps.

“I have an idea. Thalia, go find some boots from the equipment room, and you two close all the doors.”

“Why?” Sophia had her hands on her hips.

“Because.” Clio gave her the hard look she had practiced in the mirror.

Sophia withstood it for a few seconds and then joined Thalia
in shutting the storeroom doors. When they were finished, Clio beckoned them into the scullery.

“We need the hose,” she said.

“I’ll get it.” Nestor grabbed the coiled hose from a hook on the wall. Clio attached it to the faucet and unwound the loops. She fed the hose through the transom window at the top of the scullery door and ran a length of it along the hall.

“Now,” she said, “watch.”

She turned on the water.

“Clio!”

“What are you doing?”

“We can’t do that!”

“Yes, we can.” She closed the scullery door and watched as the water spread slowly across the tiles. “Everybody grab a boot,” she said. “And don’t make noise or they’ll come down and catch us.”

They took off their shoes and socks and set them on an upper step, then stuffed one foot each into a boot, hastily tucking the laces down beside their anklebones. By the time they were done, water was lapping the thresholds of the closed doors.

“Sophia, turn the water off,” Clio said.

“I can’t. If I open the door, I’ll let the water out.”

“Fine.”

Clio tossed the still-running hose back in through the transom.

“Come on, Nestor. You’re the only one who can fit.”

Two years younger at fourteen, Sophia was already as tall as Clio. With Sophia’s help, Clio lifted Nestor on her shoulders and pushed him through the transom. His one booted foot thudded against the door as he came down on the other side. She heard him yelping at the cold spray of the hose.

“Come on,” she said, and launched herself the length of the
hallway, sliding on her boot on an inch of water. Spray shot up in a rooster tail behind her, hissing against the walls and drumming lightly against the oak doors. She held her pose all the way down the hall, glorying in the stately movement. Sophia and Thalia laughed and started down behind her. She waited until they reached the end and splashed back up the hall.

“Hey,” Nestor called from inside the scullery. “I want a turn!”

“Nestor, if you open the door, the water will spread all over and it won’t work.”